On Friday, the two American journalists primarily responsible for publishing the Edward Snowden documents arrived safely in the United States for the first time in nearly a year. Given their prominent role in making public the previously secret documents, many feared that Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras had indictments under seal and might be detained upon arrival on American soil.

According to a tweet by Ted Shaffrey, a video journalist for the Associated Press, Greenwald and Poitras landed at New York’s JFK airport today. Greenwald has lived in Brazil with his partner, David Miranda, for years, and Poitras lives in Berlin.

As a result of her filmmaking and journalism prior to Snowden, Poitras had been stopped about 40 times over the past six years.

On Twitter, Greenwald quipped: "That form of harassment stopped after after she finally went public: like roaches, they scamper from the light."

The journalistic duo traveled to New York in part to accept the George Polk award, a prestigious journalism prize, and dedicated it to Snowden.

That Greenwald and Poitras would visit the states again was never out of the question: in August 2013, a New York Times Magazine profile of the two reporters wrote, “They do not plan to stay away from America forever, but they have no immediate plans to return.”

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For now, their precise plans and itinerary are publicly unknown, but Greenwald is scheduled to debate the former head of the National Security Agency, Michael Hayden, at an event in Toronto next month. Greenwald confirmed earlier this week on Twitter that he would be appearing in person.

Shaffrey also published a video on YouTube showing Greenwald, Poitras, and Miranda all together at JFK. In the 84-second video, Shaffrey asks Greenwald if he thought he would be arrested upon his return.

“No, otherwise I wouldn’t have come,” Greenwald told reporters. “We had a good sense that that wouldn’t happen. We weren’t 100 percent sure, and in fact we had counsel talk to the Justice Department and they purposely wouldn’t give them any information if we were the target of a grand jury or whether there was an indictment that was filed under seal. So they were clearly wanting us to stay in this state of uncertainty because I think that they thought that that benefited them in terms the journalistic choices we were making, to think that maybe choices that we made would swing the pendulum one way or the other.”

Shaffrey followed up by asking what gave Greenwald the confidence that he wouldn’t be taken into custody.

“Just the expectation that they wouldn’t be that incredibly stupid and incredibly destructive to try to something that in the eyes of the world would be viewed as so incredibly authoritarian that would forever undermine their ability to criticize other governments for imprisoning journalists and for having a constitutional fight over the First Amendment that successive administrations have wanted to avoid,” he said, before rejoining the rest of his party.

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is the Senior Business Editor at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is due out in May 2018 from Melville House. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar